


Rubato

by jonathonharker



Series: The Unfinished Symphony [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, does the ocean count as a character here? i think it should, if you look very closely, of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26297641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonathonharker/pseuds/jonathonharker
Summary: Before they set out beyond Wall Maria, Levi returns to the place of their final stand, where he said goodbye.A part of him died along with Erwin that day. This house is his graveyard, too.
Relationships: Levi/Erwin Smith
Series: The Unfinished Symphony [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1910749
Comments: 7
Kudos: 37





	Rubato

**Author's Note:**

> **rubato** , origin Italian: _music terminology_  
>  _lit._ robbed, stolen time.  
> 1\. the temporary disregarding of strict tempo to allow an expressive slackening (or quickening), without altering the overall pace.

After all this time, the house is still standing. It surprises Levi, what with the debris that litters the street outside. Other houses along the same row are crushed by boulders or have caved in from disrepair. Standing in the flattened ruins, he could almost think it stately, if the whole scene weren’t so sunkenly macabre. 

He hears rather than sees Hange turn around and usher the others farther down the street to give him privacy. The grass is overgrown and the flowerbeds have been trampled on, the plants withered and disintegrating into dust. 

The door creaks open, and the stench grows as he ventures farther into the house. He knows it with morbid familiarity — death, the way it clings to the walls and to people, how it finds its way into your skin and makes its home there and waits for you to rot. He lived in it for years. People starved and fell sick and died alone. Every corner, there would be someone, something barely breathing but marked for death, their faces gaunt and their eyes empty. When what little of life finally left them, there would be nothing remaining for even the rats to pick from their bones. 

The door sits at the top of the staircase, foreboding and haunting. The air is stale and stings with acridity. When Levi takes the first step on the stairs, the plank instantly gives way with a sickening crack. It is too much like bones breaking. He has to grip the banister to regain his balance, his hand coming away from it plastered in dust. Dust swarms up like flies, frothing into smoke, and he coughs but it only makes things worse.

The sound of his rasping echoes like a reminder of everything that is missing. The house seems larger all of a sudden, with only him to occupy the space. Across the hall, the windows are shattered, by scavenging animals or debris, no one can say. As he ascends the stairs, the door looms greater over him, and with every step he expects the planks to yield and send him falling into oblivion. A part of him hopes they do. Maybe that way he would finally snap out of it and leave. 

He doesn’t. Levi grits his teeth and pushes the door open, unexpectedly silent, and the smell hits him all at once. If he didn’t already feel like throwing up before, he does now — the reek of decaying flesh registers before anything else. Levi forges forward into the room, tracing his hand over the wall and making a concerted effort to look away from the bed. Aside from a small bedside table, the rest of the room is barren. He forces himself to suck in air through his mouth and his lungs burn with rot. 

He’s seen death this close more times than he can count, named and nameless comrades on the battlefield. But it has always been punctuated by screaming, by terror, lives cut down too swiftly too soon.

The silence, he finds, is more suffocating.

His own mother died and he had watched it happen. Death didn’t swing its blade down or sink its teeth in — it waited; it stood in that room for months. She grew weaker by the day, and in her final hours his small hands had clasped her fingers as she coughed up so much blood it dyed the bedsheets and floorboards crimson. He had watched her breathe until she didn’t, until she went cold, and then he had watched for another week before Kenny arrived.

When Erwin died, this was the house closest to the basement that had still been standing. Levi thought it was only fitting this should be where he laid him to rest.

“You were right,” Levi says to the empty room. The sound that emerges from him is strangled. “Bastard, of course you were right.”

There had been no guarantee which battle would be their last. Every return to the walls, each time carting more dead and wounded behind them, he had felt a stranger to the world. The feeling never went away, as if any second he would discover he was already dead and fade away permanently. When Erwin had returned with his right arm gone, stricken with fever for weeks, true fear had gripped Levi with the realisation of how close he had been to losing him.

Levi supposes life has been kind to him, all things considered. He and Erwin fought side by side in more battles than he can count. Nights of late paperwork and the kind of silent comfort that can only be grown with time. Year after year, he thought: surely, this is when it all ends. But it hadn’t. It is almost more cruel, then, to have let it develop, to have let it create a space in him, to have let him see exactly what he could have had, and then rip it away.

He can’t tell if the sting in his eyes is from the dust or the gaping chasm in his chest. He turns his eyes to the bed and for a moment, he thinks the ground is quaking beneath him before he realises his whole body is shaking. It grips him with a force that wracks through him and sends him to his knees. The crack as he hits the floor rings in his head.

There is no reprieve in this world. In another life, Erwin would have been the same great leader he was in this one, without the guilt Levi knew would have eventually killed him if a titan didn’t. Levi wonders, the sort of man he would have been, the life he and Erwin could have had, without grief a garrotte wire winding around his throat. It is agony just to breathe. He desperately wants to cry like he did when he lost his mother, like when Isabel and Farlan died. But that was then. And now, Levi knows, with visceral certainty, he will be fighting until the day he dies. He will never live to see the end of the war, if there even is one, and there is no place for rest or tears, not for any soldier, and certainly not for the one designated humanity’s strongest.

He could stay here for a week; forget the world raging outside. But Hange and the other cadets are waiting outside for him. Beyond the walls lies unchartered territory, one undoubtedly hostile. This world will not wait for him. He only gets these few moments of stillness, to pour out whatever remains of his soul and mourn it here before he shuts it away forever. 

A part of him died along with Erwin that day. He always knew, as he rode out by Erwin’s side, _this could be the last one_. When he made the decision he did, it had been to free Erwin. To give back what he had given Levi. He knows how they will be remembered; his name and Erwin’s will go down in the books as ruthless machines. None of what they say will be true. Levi had wanted to spare him from that guilt that had hung over him his whole life. But nothing, not all those years of waiting, could have prepared him for how much it would hurt. In his own equation, Levi hadn’t even spared himself.

This house is his graveyard too, the golgotha of everything left of him. 

“We’re going to see the ocean.” His voice sounds so small he can hardly believe it’s his own. Levi clenches his fists against the wooden floorboards, not raising his head, just staring at the dust gathering under the bedpost. 

He wants to say, _you should be with us_. He wants to say, this isn’t fair. But those are dangerous words, let alone thoughts. Levi quashes them, half-formed in his mind; he knows their futility. He knows they will break him.

And he still has one thing left to do. 

Levi moves to stand, but his legs give out and he stumbles into the wall. Leaning against it like a lifeline, something tears its way through his throat; he tilts his head backwards and clenches his jaw until it hurts. He tries to regain his composure but his vision goes blurry, and through the vapour, he sees the deep green of the cloak lying on the bed.

“I gave you my word,” he chokes out. “I plan to keep it.”

He squeezes his eyes shut as if he can stop the outpour of memories, clapping a hand over his mouth to muffle the sob that convulses in his chest and twists, knife-like in his in gut, burying itself like shrapnel.

He hears a voice say, _Levi, thank you._ He cannot tell if it is the wind, or if he just has Erwin’s voice memorised so well he has conjured it. Or if he’s finally going crazy. Levi opens his eyes, steeling himself to even his breathing, and viciously rubs the tears tracking across his face with his shirtsleeve. His eyes fall to the bedside table and a chill runs through his veins.

A single flower stands in the pitcher, brilliant white in the sunlight streaming through the window. 

That day, he had gone into the cupboards of the house and pulled out a small glass pitcher, still intact. There was a well just two rows of houses away, and he’d brought the glass to fill it with water, and then picked whatever flowers were still stubbornly growing in the grass despite the hostile conditions. It wasn’t like it really mattered. The flowers would die within a week, and Levi was woefully inept at this sort of thing, but the flowers made the place look lived-in. It had only seemed right; the barest of a funeral rite he could perform.

The other flowers have long wilted and decayed. It’s been a whole year.

He exhales, shaky, caught between a laugh and cry. He moves on pure instinct, lurching forward, staggers and catches himself on the rough edges of the table, thinks, even this close, that he is surely hallucinating. Someone else could have put it there, but it’d have to be within the last few days. Outside, everything is barren. Levi knows this housing district has been long-abandoned by humanity since that battle, tucked away and completely inaccessible. No one but him and a select few know what this house holds. 

His mind races to a conclusion he doesn’t dare to make, and he picks the flower up by the stem, almost expecting it to crumble in his hand. Levi holds it up to the window, rays of light streaming in and illuminating the particles of dust spiralling in the room. Like this, the petals look almost translucent, fragile in the way a butterfly’s wings are. 

“I’ll see that promise through,” he repeats softly, turning the stem in his hands, watching the way the light reflects on the glass. The water has long dried out and only traces of the other flowers’ withered remnants coalesce at the base. 

Levi places the flower back and heads for the door. The world will continue running, and no matter how much time he tries to carve out of it, it will force him forward. The world is callous; selfish, even after all the time it has stolen from him. There is no scenario, not in this world, for him to have a happy ending. He doesn’t even know what that might mean. And with all he has done; all he has lost — there cannot be one. What little he has scraped for himself is all for which he can ask. It will never be enough, but he has to tell himself it is.

Levi turns back one last time — looking at the light falling on the one living thing in the room — and says, something inconceivable in his lungs: “So wait for me.”

When he sees the ocean, he is a cadet once more, staring at the sky for the first time venturing beyond the walls. For a moment, the crashing of waves slackens, and the fresh breeze slows as it runs past him —

and he breathes again. 

**Author's Note:**

> This was the product of June quarantine writing practice and me listening to the soundtrack. I also spent a lot of that time staring at sheet music. Anyway, the recent manga updates reminded me to post it. I originally wrote it without the vaguely positive ending but reworked it a little in light of...Isayama never giving us a break. 
> 
> come say hi on [tumblr](http://jonathonharker.tumblr.com)!


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